What the heck is Renaissance^TM anyway?

In order to give our loyal international customers the same access to Magic: The Gathering® that our English-speaking customers have enjoyed, Wizards of the Coast has made the cards available in many other languages.

Part of giving everyone equal access to the cards also means access to expansions. However, we and all our partners in this translation enterprise realized that there was no way to start translating at the beginning with Arabian Nights® and also reach our goal of simultaneous release in all languages; this forced us to decide which sets would be printed for the first time in each language.

Our policy instructs that we not print cards in white-border sets that didn't previously appear in either the original black-border Magic: The Gathering set in that language or in some black-border expansion set of that language. For example, the initial set for German and French is the same set as the Revised^TM (third edition) set and the first German and French cards were released with black borders. Since there were no previous German or French expansions, the cards rotated into Magic: The Gathering--Fourth Edition^TM , according to our policy, had to have first appeared with a black border before Fourth Edition could be printed with a white border.

The cards that rotated into Fourth Edition appeared with black borders as a special card set called Renaissance in French and German. The foreign-language editions of Chronicles^TM initially appeared as black-border sets, except for Italian. Instead, there was a special Italian black-border version of Renaissance that included Chronicles cards, but not cards that originally appeared in Legends® or The Dark® . This is why there are two separate card lists for Renaissance.